From the very first time KitGuru opens the doors of its Lab to the world 4 years ago, we have stressed that our preferred upgrade for any system – desktop or laptop – is the addition of a solid state drive.

Once reserved for the rich and famous, pricing on these beauties has tumbled consistently and now there’s no excuse for any system to boost from a traditional spinning hard drive.

While you can learn to live with 60GB, it can be a terrible existence. Around 120GB, you have enough space to play with on a daily basis but you will still need to move a lot of files back and forth with a traditional mechanical hard drive or NAS.

Genuinely liveable happens when you reach 240GB. When the non 3K version of the 240GB Kingston HyperX SSD first arrived with KitGuru in 2011, we were impressed – in spite of its £409 price tag.

We concluded that it was a great drive, but that “240GB drives are only for a wealthy audience”.

Although we prefer to focus on new products when we do our annual round up, the decision by Ann Keefe at Kingston to drop the price on this product to around £130 makes it a brand new proposition – and it’s not one we can ignore.

While there are some strong offers from the likes of OCZ and ADATA, we can’t ignore the largest memory company on the planet making such a powerful drive available for so little cash.